Part of the Yiddish Book Center's Online Lecture Series
In 1919, the new Soviet state named Yiddish the “official
language” of Soviet Jewry. To this day, Yiddish is still one of the
state languages of Birobidzhan, the Jewish Autonomous Region of Russia.
In the intervening years, Soviet Jewish culture-makers produced some of
the most avant-garde, creative forms of Jewish culture anywhere in the
world. At the same time, the Soviet state that had empowered them ended
up destroying them and their culture, person by person, institution by
institution. These lectures examine the romance of radical Yiddish
culture and the tragedy that destroyed many of the most creative minds
of that culture.
Introduction
Lecture 1 – The Early Years of Soviet Yiddish Culture
In
this first session, we will examine Soviet Jewish culture-makers, who
developed their craft in the heat of war and revolution and created an
avant-garde Yiddish culture to which much of the world looked for
inspiration.
Lecture 2 – Stalinism and Yiddish Culture
The
1930s were, by some measures, the heyday of Soviet Yiddish culture. At
the same time, 1930s Soviet Yiddish literature moved away from
avant-garde poetry and towards realist novels, and theater went from
radical egalitarianism to the production of classical Shakespeare…in
Yiddish. In this session, we will study the contradictions of Stalinist
Yiddish culture.
Lecture 3 – Yiddish During and After the War
In
this session, we will study the many faces of wartime Soviet Yiddish
culture and the postwar destruction of many of those institutions that
had helped mobilize the Soviet Jewish population.
Lecture 4 –
From Heymland to a Non-Jewish Jewish Autonomous Region The secret
Soviet trials for treason of important members of the Jewish
Anti-Fascist Committee revealed Soviet Yiddish cultural activists’
resistance to and complicity with the Stalinist state. But with Stalin’s
death in 1953, Khrushchev’s rise to power, and the “Thaw” in cultural
relations, Soviet Yiddish culture saw a revival. In this session, we
will look at the twenty-five years since the fall of the Soviet Union,
in which Soviet Yiddish culture has gone global.
